Fedora 8 on the Dell X1 – discussion

November 12th, 2007 00:04 by Martin

Okay, so I updated my Dell Latitude X1 to Fedora 8. I downloaded the DVD ISO, and installed from the external DVD drive. I wiped out the partitions / (root), /boot and swap, and kept my /home partition. (Ie. I did not “upgrade” but did a “fresh” install).

I must say, the upgrade did NOT go without problems: Read the rest of this entry »

Quick test of the Fedora 8 KDE LiveCD

November 10th, 2007 18:45 by Martin

Hi all, here is a small “report” on my findings after having tried Fedora 8 KDE LiveCD for half an hour on my Dell Latitude X1. See my previous notes on earlier Fedora versions here.

Please note that the KDE LiveCD is not exactly the same as a full Fedora 8 installation.

* Widescreen works out of the box at 1280×768
* Compiz works – just enable it from the settings menu Read the rest of this entry »

My traces are moved and upgraded

October 30th, 2007 20:10 by Martin

As you might notice, I’ve moved this blog to a new location, so please update your bookmarks and links1. I’ve also upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1 (via WP 2.3). If you notice any rough edges, please let me know by posting a comment here (hope it works). Feel free to try it out.

I have not found a working Quicktags2 plugin that produce valid HTML code yet, but I’ll keep looking.


  1. …if you got any, that is ;) []
  2. Quicktags let you produce HTML formatted comments easily. []

Fedora 7 on the Dell X1 – discussion

June 11th, 2007 04:22 by Martin

Yesterday I installed Fedora 7 on my Dell Latitude X1. Previously, I have runned Fedora Core 4, Fedora Core 5 and Fedora Core 6. Check out what I’ve written and discussed about those versions on my Linux on a Dell X1 page or from the sidebar.

This post is dedicated to the discussion around the Fedora 7 page (which is not called Fedora Core 7, as the “core” and the “extras” now have been merged).

The good news about Fedora 7 on the Dell Latitude X1, is that most of the stuff simply works out of the box – finally! No more tweaks to get the widescreen resolution right (aka 915resolution video bios patching) Even 3D desktop eye candy with Beryl in KDE works without any hassle.

I haven’t been able to test it thoroughly yet, but it even seems like the ACPI stuff works out out the box, using the KPowersave applet. No more fiddling around with the sleep scripts, yay!

Please feel free to make comments and suggestions here.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.2

May 18th, 2007 15:45 by Martin

So, I’ve just upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.2 because of a tremendous amount of spam lately. But the upgrade didn’t seem to solve the problem entirely, so I’ve also added a stupid question to be answered when commenting – sorry about that.

To give you an idea of the amount of spam blogs like this is experiencing – the filtered spam count today has been more than 150, and my blog has in total filtered more than 83000 spam comments… (you can see the current spam count on the sidebar)

Please let me know if anything is broken.

Have a nice day folks :)

Fedora Core 6 on the Dell X1 – discussion

October 7th, 2006 20:04 by Martin

Yep, I’ve installed the Fedora Core 6 on my Dell Latitude X1. Check out my Fedora Core 6 page (FC6) on the sidebar. Here we can discuss how things work out. Before asking here, you might want to check out my other post about Linux on the X1, that is mostly related to FC4 and FC5.

When available, I will of course move on to Fedora Core 6 stable.

Why NOT buy a Zune?

October 2nd, 2006 21:37 by Martin

Apple iPod doesn't make you cool, it makes you a fool.Apple’s iPod is infected with DRM. So is the Microsoft Zune. Don’t buy it; it is extremely user-UNfriendly, and Microsoft Media Player shreds your rights.
You cannot backup your license key. It is not backwards compatible with PlaysForSure. It is trying to lock you to the device.

Tomorrow (2006-10-03) is the international anti-DRM day. Take two or three minutes to learn what DRM is.

See also:
Du kan ikke spille kjøpt musikk [Norwegian]
I dag er anti-DRM-dagen [Norwegian]

Fedora Core 5 and KDE

March 22nd, 2006 20:59 by Martin

So, I just installed Fedora Core 5 (final) the other day. Did it make me happy? No.
Why? Because I prefer KDE over GNOME. And KDE isn’t really “FC5 ready”.

There is no bluetooth support in KDE when using FC5. KDE bluetooth worked just fine in FC4, but now there are no binaries available, and I just didn’t manage to compile it myself (it requires Qt 4?).

Also, I would like to synchronize my mobile phone with Kontact. There’s a fantastic project going on called opensync, but it just isn’t finished yet, and there is no support for the KDE PIM – yet.

So why am I so disappointed? Because it all is working so well in Fedora Core 2. I have a Linux box at work running FC2 with multisync, kbluetoothd and the Opera 9 Preview 2 – stable as hell.

With FC5, GNOME 2.14 is able to put my Dell Latitude X1 into sleep – and wake it up again without any problems. In KDE I need to hack the ACPI scripts manually. In KDE even the windows key stopped working as a modifier key (put “add mod4 = Super_L” in /etc/X11/Xmodmap to fix it). I was so eager to get FC5 started that I didn’t have time to include all packages in the initial install, but when I logged in to GNOME and tried to add packages from the DVD it was not possible without a network connection… Jesus…

The Fedora Project is planning to remove KDE from core, which pretty much means that I have to remove Fedora from my laptop. What will be my next distro? Kubuntu? Nee, I don’t think Kubuntu is any more pro KDE than what a “KFedora” would be. openSUSE? Mandriva?

More on KDE vs GNOME here

NRK nett-TV i Linux? I Opera??

February 9th, 2006 23:15 by Martin

NRK nett-TV i Linux med Opera 9 Preview 2Noen gang prøvd å se nett-TV (web-TV) på nrk.no i Linux? Med Opera 8.51? Kanskje i Opera 9 Preview 2?

Ha! Trukke du får til det. Norsk RriksKringkasting har nemlig bestemt seg for å ikke støtte fri programvare. PIN STEIKE MEG HELT UTROLIG! Dette kommer fram av den tekniske informasjonen, siden med tittelen Hvorfor valgte NRK Windows Media Player? og NRKs side om Linux, Media Player og åpne standarder.

Fy faen, jeg blir kvalm.

Elektronisk Forpost Norge har ihvertfall forsøkt å gjøre noe med dette. Les deres åpne brev til NRK. Du vil kanskje lese dette brevet også.

Site upgrade

February 5th, 2006 18:55 by Martin

This is Jesus, a prophet like MohammadJust dropping a short note – I’ve upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.0.1 and added a few plugins. Most important:

  • Subscribe to comments
  • Search Everything – the search gives resluts from comments as well
  • XHTML validator – validates posts
  • WP-Polls (Polls will probably be in norwegian – on the sidebar)

The posting interface is greatly improved. (If you don’t like it – change it in “My account”, top right on the posting page.)

My moblog is down at the moment because of the increased security in WP 2.0.1. I’m working on it.

You might want to change the default theme in the Theme Switcher on the sidebar (maybe to Minnepinne?)

All feedback is welcome :)

Oh yes, dropped in a picture of a random prophet…

GPRS internet connection via bluetooth with SE T610

December 18th, 2005 19:17 by Martin

When you’re running around in the mountains with your nifty Dell X1 and you just have to check if your server is still running, be sure to also have your cell phone in your pocket and follow these steps to get online.
Read the rest of this entry »

KiSS DP-558 PC-Link replacement for Linux: kissd

November 29th, 2005 21:39 by Martin

(As usual, all norwegian non-Linux fan can just press “Generell” in the Categories list to avoid all this Linux stuff…)

  • I’ve got a KiSS DP-558 DVD recorder.
  • I’m a Linux user.
  • I want to use the PC-Link software, i.e. to be able to play media content remotely from my laptop or PC.

This is possible with kissd.

Here’s a small how-to:
Read the rest of this entry »

User support at hyves.net

November 24th, 2005 12:58 by Martin

I just checked out this www.hyves.net, and found out that their pages did not contain valid HTML, so I sent a feedback telling them that I would not join their community until they had fixed the problem (i.e. validating through validator.w3.org). This is the reply I got:

Hi,

Please, mail me your username and password, so I can delete your account!!

Greetings,

Monica Sobrino Gutierrez

Nice user support. Goodbye hyves.net.

Compiling qt packages in FC4

September 4th, 2005 10:32 by Martin

Problem:
I’ve tried to compile several packages that requires Qt 3 or higher and got quite annoyed every time the configure scripts started complaining

checking for Qt... configure: error:
Qt (>= Qt 3.0) (headers and libraries) not found.
Please check your installation!

even though I have installed qt-devel.
Read the rest of this entry »

Silva Atlas GPS pinouts

July 11th, 2005 22:44 by Martin

The Silva Atlas GPS is actually just the same device as the Lowrance iFinder and the Brunton Atlas.

It took me quite a while to figure this out. Swedish Silva(TM) did not want to give me the pinouts for the unit, but it seems Lowrance has got another policy
Fantastic. Read the rest of this entry »

GPS Software for Linux

July 11th, 2005 22:39 by Martin

gpsdrive on Fedora Core 4 How-To

Update: See my step by step in the comment below.
Downlaod gpsdrive and unpack the tarball.
Fedora Core 4 uses gcc version 4, but gpsdrive 2.1pre2 doesn’t know that… Therefore, change the configure file according to
Read the rest of this entry »

Asus WL-167G USB Wireless WLAN Adapter in Linux

June 5th, 2005 18:24 by Martin

This is a how-to on how to get an Asus WL-167G USB 2.0 WLAN dongle (802.11g) working in Fedora Core 3. The correct kernel module is rt2570.ko (for a 2.6 kernel).

Updated: 2005-07-02
Read the rest of this entry »

Linux on Dell X1

June 3rd, 2005 09:47 by Martin

Dell Latitude X1Samsung Q30This is my blog entry for Linux related stuff about my Dell Latitude X1 (aka Samsung Q30). Please read my Dell X1 page which will provide up to date info.

Comments and requests are welcome here.

Dell goes to hell

May 9th, 2005 11:22 by Martin

Dell goes to hell

How can we take this computer company seriously? And where can I download Microsoft Internet Explorer for Unix??

How to make TwinMOS usb memorystick mount automatically (hotplug) in linux

November 7th, 2004 16:34 by Martin

I just bought a TwinMOS Mobile Disk and wanted it to hotplug in linux Fedora Core 2 on my laptop. This is how.
This is what dmesg gives me:

usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using address 7
scsi4 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: USB 2.0 Model: Mobile Disk N4S Rev: 1.00
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
SCSI device sda: 507904 512-byte hdwr sectors (260 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda: sda1
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi4, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Attached scsi generic sg0 at scsi4, channel 0, id 0, lun 0, type 0
USB Mass Storage device found at 7
updfstab: Using deprecated /dev/sg mechanism instead of SG_IO on the actual device

So my device is a “Mobile Disk N4S Rev: 1.00″. Now, as root, edit /etc/updfstab.conf.default so it includes the following (I figured this out by reading bug 111507):

device microdrive {
partition 1
match hd IBM-DMDM
match hd "Twinmos Mobile Disk"
match hd "Mobile Disk N4S"
}

Next, follow the explanation in bug 111506 and add the following line in
/etc/hotplug/usb.distmap (one line):

usb-storage 0x000f 0x0ea0 0x06803 0x0200 0x0200 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00000000

Now you can simply plug your device, and in 2 seconds the directory /mnt/microdrive will magically show up. Invoke mount /mnt/microdrive to access it. Before unplugging it, you should do a umount /mnt/microdrive.

Keywords: usb 2.0 dongle flash disk on key fail to hotplug configure set up settings pendrive pen drive redhat linux redhat 9.0 fedora core 1 fedora core 2 fedora core 3 fc1 fc2 fc3 kernel 2.4 kernel 2.6.8-1.521 porn-in-pocket